The 12th edition of the BusinessDay CEO Forum, which will take place tomorrow (November 19), features a Master Class by Hal Gregerson, the executive director of the MIT Leadership Centre and New York Times bestselling author.
The Masters Class is themed Questions are the Answer: Leveraging the Power of Inquiry to Win Competitive Advantage.
Gregerson has built a reputation around demonstrating the direct linkages between focused inquiry, innovation and competitive advantage.
He is a proponent of asking the right questions. “The important and difficult job is never to find the right answer, it is to find the right question,” he teaches.
Instead of holding brainstorming sessions to generate solutions, he suggests CEOs hold ‘question-storming’ sessions that think of nothing but questions about a problem for a given period of time.
The goal of the class is to empower leaders with the right tools to forge ahead in uncharted waters the world is currently passing through.
This year alone, businesses in Nigeria have faced a myriad of challenges ranging from the Covid-19 pandemic, worsening economic indicators and the EndSARS protest in October, which disrupted a lot of businesses.
The Covid-19 induced lockdown took a toll on most businesses in the first half of the year as the economy contracted -6.1 percent in the second quarter of the year.
Inflation rate is currently at its highest in nearly three years at 14.2 percent while unemployment rate is also at its highest in six years at 27.1 percent.
The Masters Class will give an exposition on how to navigate through these challenges and survive post Covid-19. The class will also enumerate how leaders can foster cultures of inquiry and curiosity within their organisations.
CEOs in conversation
There are disruptive leaders who continue to change the narrative, they have established new processes while navigating through the harsh environment to obtain outstanding results.
These are the ones who break away from the herd to beat a path to the future of customer taste, technology shifts, regulatory standards, and pricing power.
This panel discussion will bring together CEOs who have made revolutionary, but non-obvious and counterintuitive decisions that catapulted their companies to the top of their ranks in a discussion themed Anti-Consensus: Lessons from Going against the Grain.
The Covid-19 outbreak has brought to light the need for bold thinking if companies will thrive in the emerging environment.
Hanu Agbodje, CEO, Patricia Technologies, will be joined by other CEOs to shed light on how to cast aside conventional thinking for more disruptive approaches.
The CEOs will also share lessons on how they won internal stakeholders’ support, earning the patience of shareholders.
The CEOs will also speak to the lessons learned that could be applied by those searching for inflection diving boards in the post-pandemic economy
Panel sessions
The first panel will feature a conversation between Randall S. Kroszner; Deputy Dean for Executive Programmes, Norman R. Bobins; Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Babatunde Fajemirokun, CEO, AIICO Insurance plc.
This panel is themed KUV balls: Recovery Shapes and their Implications for 2021 Economic Outlook.
The panellists will discuss how the Covid-19 pandemic and efforts to chart a recovery will define national economic planning and central bank policies over the next few years and what the recovery trajectory will look like.
Furthermore, the discussion will also centre on government policy options for reflating demand without worsening inflation and the lessons from the US’ 2008 financial crisis that can be applied to economic recovery policy planning for Nigeria.
In the second panel session, Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of Acumen, will be joined by two senior company executives Bola Asiru and Adesuwa Okunbo-Rhodes who are involved in impact investing to discuss profit Tense: Why Impact Investing isn’t an Oxymoron.
This session will answer questions such as does business have a social responsibility? To what degree? Are the payment of taxes and ticking of legal code checkboxes adequate to justify the label ‘responsible corporate citizen’?
The fourth panel titled Women, Leadership and Power: Building Tomorrow Today, will look at the causes of the resistant strains to gender diversity that persist in most Nigerian companies.
Ivana Osagie, founder of The Professional Women Roundtable, will moderate the panel discussion.
The fifth panel is titled “When the Shortest Distance isn’t a Straight Line: Takeaways from CEOs who reinvented their business models.”
The panellists are Esigie Aguele, co-founder and CEO, VerifyMe Nigeria; Teni Adesanya, executive chairman, Oxford Group Nigeria, and Wole Abu, CEO, Pan African Towers.
The CEOs will discuss the tools they have used to identify the need for change and the trends they have spotted in necessitating change.
Over the years, the CEO Forum has attracted global thought-leaders as keynote speakers. Past speakers such as Aliko Dangote, president of the Dangote Group; Dominic Barton, global managing partner of McKinsey & Co, and Richard Dobbs, senior partner at McKinsey, and co-author of the book, No Ordinary Disruption (2017), among others.
